Ask Me Something: How will AI change business?

From chatbots and face recognition to digital voice assistants, the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and its introduction into our daily lives is raising questions about its use. What challenges do AI present? What are its benefits and ethical concerns? 

Dr. Mohammad Keyhani, PhD, University of Calgary associate professor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haskayne School of Business, is researching AI and the potential effects it’ll have on our future.

How is AI currently being used in business?

Perhaps the earliest application of AI has been in customer support. Almost anything that is routine that follows a standard procedure, follows a very clear checklist, involves routine tasks like filling out forms or copy-pasting things, is very amenable to being automated with AI. But I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. In general, most people who have routine, boring aspects to their jobs would like AI to handle those things so they can focus on other things. 

What are some common misconceptions about AI?

A misconception that is still up for debate is a lot of people when they see a brain as intelligent as the latest large language models, they start to feel like this may be a creature that is actually alive. I don't think that is true, because, essentially, a large language model is one giant math formula, and I don't think a math formula is alive. It’s really a different form of intelligence from whatever we've had in the past. We never thought that would be possible, but now we see that it is possible. 

What ethical issues arise with the use of AI in business and how is that addressed?

We’ve never had intelligence detached from life available as a digital artifact the way we now have with large language models and generative AI — it's kind of like a human brain, but it behaves differently. They happen to have some of the biases and discriminatory behaviours that humans have. There’s sexism, racism, which has already been studied and shown that AI can exhibit these behaviours, so that's one of the key ethical issues. Another big ethical issue that we face is around copyright and intellectual property. Most of the large language models available today that exhibit frontier-level intelligence have been trained on some material without permission. So, now we must grapple with the consequences of that if we're going to allow that in the future. 

How will AI affect business in the long run?

Thinking about the long term is so hard given how fast things are changing, but there are some things that I feel pretty certain about. One is we're going to have generally much smaller companies in terms of the number of humans who work in an organization. Another way in which organizations will change is that everybody will be able to build software very easily for whatever they want to do. A lot of people who don't consider themselves software people or programmers will eventually start building software for the various things that they need to get done. And, lastly, I think we're going to transition slowly from a very jobs-based society to an entrepreneurship-based society where most people will manage themselves.

There are many fears about AI taking jobs in business. Are these fears valid?

I think to some extent they're valid when the displacement happens too fast that people don't have time to adjust. But, in the long term, in previous technological revolutions, we have adapted relatively successfully over time to a new technology. In the case of generative AI, I think the threat is real. A lot of jobs will go away and won't be replaced necessarily by new jobs and organized actions, and that's why I think a transition to a more entrepreneurship-based society rather than a jobs-based society is likely to happen in the long term. But I don’t think it’s going to be a society where a lot of people are just out of a job. AI will give them superpowers and they will be able to do really interesting things. 

Are there certain areas in business that could benefit more from AI than others?

Currently, I think many businesses are still in exploration mode trying to figure out in what areas AI is the most helpful. The technology is rapidly changing and advancing so fast that many organizers have been hesitant to invest too much — and sometimes it's worth waiting a little bit to see what's going to happen, to figure out what the best applications are going to be for.